The long term objective is to enable chemists to scan chemical structures and have a computer provide accurate and timely identification of the structure. This is proposed to be done by scanning in a chemical symbol using a normal scanning process and shipping the resultant digitized image to a computer package, the neocognitron. The neocognitron is based on neural network technology which is excellent at pattern recognition. The neocognitron has demonstrated the ability to recognize handwritten letters and numbers. It will be trained to recognize complex chemical symbols and to provide the correct chemical reference number. This provides access to a chemical catalog which contains the chemical structure, the name and pertinant information. Scaling and training issues will be addressed in fitting the neocognitron to identify chemical symbols.